Review: \”And Then There Were (N-One)\” by Sarah Pinsker

When I saw that Sarah Pinsker\’s novella \”And Then There Were (N-One)\” was the story of a character named Sarah Pinsker attending a cross-dimensional convention populated entirely by other Sarah Pinskers from across the multiverse, I have to admit, I braced myself for some self-indulgent, pretentious \”literary fiction\”.  What I got instead was an engaging and entertaining story that struck a perfect balance – it was introspective, but not to the point of navel-gazing; it was full of in-jokes, but ones that pretty much anyone who\’s ever been to a sci-fi convention would be in on; and despite the story\’s cast of characters being endless variations on the author herself, it was nevertheless relatable to anyone else who\’s spent a lot of time thinking about the choices they make and what might happen if they were different.

In some other universe, a Sarah Pinsker discovered cross-dimensional travel, and being the kind of nerd many of us are, organized \”SarahCon\” to gather as many different Sarah Pinskers as she could to compare notes and see how else their lives could have gone.  It\’s a classic sci-fi \”big idea\” kind of concept, and the author executes on it brilliantly.  She\’s not afraid to imagine herself as potentially having been many different types of people; while the first few Sarahs we meet are distinguished by hairstyle and profession (and taste in alcohol), we eventually meet a few transgender versions, some Sarahs with drug problems, a few with significant tragedies in their pasts… and a dead Sarah, whose murder our protagonist Sarah is asked to investigate.

Honestly, I don\’t know if I could have written about hundreds of versions of myself with anywhere near this level of self-awareness and empathy; that alone is worthy of admiration, to say nothing of the skill with which the author weaves the philosophical questions of what might have been together with a well-executed speculative-fiction murder mystery.  \”And Then There Were (N-One)\” is certainly one of my favorite novellas of the year; deciding between it and All Systems Red for the top slot on my ballot was a very difficult choice, but one I had to make eventually.  So here\’s my ballot for Best Novella:

1. All Systems Red, Martha Wells
2. \”And Then There Were (N-One), Sarah Pinsker
3. Binti: Home, Nnedi Okorafor
4. Down Among the Sticks and Bones​, Seanan McGuire
5. The Black Tides of Heaven, JY Yang
6. River of Teeth, Sarah Gailey